Understanding Sociology: Growth and Genesis

Dr.Roluahpuia
Assistant Professor
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences,
Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee
HISTORY OF A DISCIPLINE: HOW IT BEGAN?

▪ Study and writings of society prevalent since ancient times.

▪ There has always been interest about societies and groups such as in the

writings of philosophers and religious teachers.

▪ In the 13th Century, Ma Tuan-Lin, a Chinese historian, first recognized

social dynamics as an underlying component of historical development in

his seminal encyclopedia, General Study of Literary Remains.
▪ Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) of Tunisia wrote about many topics of interest

today, setting a foundation for both modern sociology and economics,

including a theory of social conflict, a comparison of nomadic and
sedentary life, a description of political economy, and a study connecting a
tribe’s social cohesion to its capacity for power.
SOCIOLOGY: THE SCIENCE OF SOCIETY

▪ Sociology is the scientific study of social life, groups, and societies. 

▪ Sociology teaches us that what we regard as natural, inevitable, good, or true may

not be such and that the “givens” of our life—including things we assume to be
genetic or biological—are strongly influenced by historical, cultural, social, and
even technological forces.

▪ Doing and studying sociology involves critical thinking. 

▪ Sociology requires a skeptical and restless quality of mind. It continually

questions the self-proclaimed reasons for any social arrangement. 

SOCIOLOGY: THE SCIENCE OF SOCIETY

▪Sociology has from its beginning understood itself as a science.

▪ It has to be internally consistent.
▪ Findings or study has to be supported by evidence.

▪It is bounded by scientific canons of procedure, methods and

observations.
▪It means that the statement that sociologist arrives at must be
arrived through the observations of certain rules or evidence that
allow others to check or to repeat to develop his/her findings
further.
▪Sociological observations are different from common sense
observations.
 NATURALISTIC VS SOCIOLOGICAL
APPROACH
▪ Common sense explanations are based on what is known as ‘naturalistic
explanation’ that assumes one can identify natural reasons for behavior.
Sociology emphasize scientific reasoning and has a body of concepts and
data.
▪ Common sense is unreflective whereas sociology follows a systematic and
questioning approach.

Explanation of Naturalistic Sociological

Poverty People are poor because they Poverty is caused by the

are afraid to work, come from structure of inequality
‘problem families’, are existent in society and is
unable to budget properly and experienced by those who
suffer from low intelligence. suffer from chronic
irregularity of work and low
wages.
SOCIOLOGY IN THE TIME OF
CORONA
 SOCIOLOGY: EMERGENCE
▪ All intellectual fields are profoundly shaped by their social settings. This is particularly true

of sociology, which not only is derived from that setting but takes the social setting as its
basic subject matter

▪ The development of sociology, and its current concerns, has to be grasped in the context of

changes that have created the modern world.

▪ Sociology emerged with the advent of modernity.

• Economically, modernity transformed most people from peasants to workers in a complex division

of labor.
• Politically, modernity created distinct nation-states with clear boundaries.

• Technologically, modernity applied scientific knowledge to producing everything from consumer

goods to lethal weapons.

• Demographically, there is a mass migration resulting into urbanisation in a scale that was never

seen before in human history.

▪ The rise of sociology is part of a much larger story about the emergence of the modern

world itself.
HISTORY OF SOCIOLOGY
 FACTORS
1) Enlightenment
2) Political revolutions
3) The Industrial Revolution and the Rise of Capitalism.
4) The rise of socialism
5) Feminism
6) Urbanization
7) Religion
ENLIGHTENMENT THINKERS
 ENLIGHTENMENT
▪ Enlightenment was a period in Europe roughly beginning from the middle of the 17th
Century through the 18th Century.

▪ It emphasise the importance of reason and science both to understand social and
natural phenomena.

▪ It grew out of the new discoveries and advancement made in science and formed the
foundation of all modern sciences.

▪ The core of enlightenment idea was the emphasis on reason and rationality. All
enlightenment thinkers (e.g., Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, David Hume,
Thomas Jefferson) came from different countries and different family but emphasise
similar ideas: reason and rationality.

▪ Enlightenment writers argued that reason was the individual’s naturally endowed gift;
that each of us, by virtue of being human, possesses the innate ability to think or to
reason about things and about ourselves.

▪ There was a rejection of non-irrational beliefs and traditional authority such as

monarchs.
 ENLIGHTENMENT
▪ The link between modernity and sociology was the Enlightenment. The

Enlightenment challenged religious belief, dogma, and authority. It sought to

replace them with scientific reason, logic, and knowledge.

▪ Nature and the universe could be explained through reason using mathematical

precision.

▪ Enlightenment transform the manner in which we understood society and the

manner in which we understood ourselves. If we are to able to understand what is

wrong and what is right in society, it also means that we can change society.

▪ Science over faith, reason over belief.

POLITICAL REVOLUTIONS
▪ Two revolutions that change the world were: French Revolution and American

Revolution.

▪ Altered human history and their impact was felt globally.

▪ Dissolved the forms of social organisation in which humankind had lived for

hundreds of years, monarchy and feudalism in the case of France.

▪ In France, monarchy were seen as deriving their power from divine sources and

the society was feudal in character divided into three estates: the first estate

(clergy), the second estate (nobility) and the society (peasants, artisans and
 POLITICAL REVOLUTIONS
French Revolution American Revolution

• Establish the idea of equality, liberty and • Introduced the idea of democracy.
fraternity. • Resulted into major social change in
• Changed the French social and political American society.
order. • Ideas of American revolution influence
• Dissolution of a social order and the old the world.
order which was based on kinship, • The authority of government leaders
church, monarchy. should derive from the will of the
• A new wave of intellectual and people; hence the opening line in the
philosophical thoughts was let loose in US constitution: “We the People …”
Europe.
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND THE RISE OF
CAPITALISM
▪ Traced to Britain and then spread to other parts of Western Europe and the United

States.

▪ Technological modernity : steam engines and mechanization of production giving

rise to factory system of production.

▪ Resulted into massive social and economic changes: from feudalism and capitalism.

▪ Emergence of different classes of people in society, rich and poor, workers and

capitalists.
▪ Technological and scientific advancement brought about changes in the mode and

pattern of production.  Shift from agrarian to industrial society leading to

mechanization of agricultural production.

▪ Migration of people from rural to urban areas leading to rapid urbanization.

 THE RISE OF SOCIALISM
▪ Ideas of socialism began to take roots along with the Industrial

Revolution.

▪ Most pronounced in the work of Karl Marx.

▪ Socialist ideas emerged against the excesses of the industrial system and

capitalism.

▪ Various other sociologists such as Weber and Durkheim recognize the

problem with capitalism but were opposed to socialism.

▪ This fear shape sociological theory and hence many were regarded as

‘conservatives’ in their outlook.

 FEMINISM
▪ Emerge against the suppression of women.

▪ First in the 1780s and 1790s with the debates surrounding the American and

French revolutions; a far more organized movement emerged.

▪ Focused effort in the 1850s as part of the mobilization against slavery and for

political rights for the middle class.

▪ Massive mobilization for women’s suffrage and for industrial and civic

reform legislation in the early twentieth century.

▪ All of this had an impact on the development of sociology, in particular on

the work of a number of women in or associated with the field—Harriet

Martineau, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, Anna
Julia Cooper, Ida Wells-Barnett, Marianne Weber, and Beatrice Potter Webb.
 URBANIZATION
▪ Partly as a result of the Industrial Revolution, large numbers of people in the nineteenth and

twentieth centuries were uprooted from their rural homes and moved to urban settings.

▪ In addition, the expansion of the cities produced seemingly endless list of urban problems

—overcrowding, pollution, noise, traffic, and so forth. The nature of urban life and its

problems attracted the attention of many early sociologists, especially Max Weber and

Georg Simmel.

▪ The first major school of American sociology, the Chicago school, was in large part defined

by its concern for the city and its interest in using Chicago as a laboratory in which to study

urbanization and its problems.

▪ Resulted into new social problems: poverty, slums, crime.

 URBANIZATION
▪ Urbanization:
§ More and more population living in urban areas.

Year Cities of 20,000 or more Cities of 100,000 or

more

1800 2.4 1.7

1850 4.3 2.3

1900 9.2 5.5

1950 20.9 13.1

1970 31.2 16.7

1982 34.6 18.1

 RELIGION
▪Ideas of religion changed due to industrial and political

revolutions.

▪Many early sociologists came from religious backgrounds and

have occupied important field of study.

▪ Durkheim wrote one of his major works on religion. Morality

played a key role not only in Durkheim’s sociology but also in

the work of Talcott Parsons. A large portion of Weber’s work
also was devoted to the religions of the world.